Editor's Letter
Born Creative, Not Consumers: How Stories Keep the Gift Alive
By Dr Marina Nani
Give a four-year-old a cardboard box and within minutes it is a ship, a castle or a shop with a queue outside the door. Nobody has to sell her the idea. I raised three children, and not one of them ever waited to be handed a story. They invented them at breakfast, performed them in the hallway and changed the ending whenever the ending bored them.
We are born creative. Consuming is a habit we learn later, one screen, one feed and one recommended purchase at a time, until many of us forget that we ever made anything at all. I have always believed that every person arrives in the world a genius. I call it Stardust, and I have never met a child without it.
Our cover star, Ana Braunstein, kept hers. As a little girl she wrote stories and performed them for her mother, her siblings and her friends. As a teenager she wrote and acted in plays at school, at church and in her community whenever she could. Years later she wrote a screenplay, This Case and My Life, and turned it into a short film that she wrote, directed, produced and starred in. It won more than 80 awards at festivals around the world. The response from audiences brought back the love of writing she had carried since childhood, and she spent the next few years turning the film into four novels. The fourth arrived this October. Ana wrote a script, and her career proves there is no script for creativity.
Building New Worlds
A story lets you take something familiar and set it down somewhere nobody expected. Ana took a Manhattan attorney who believes life can be won like a case in court, moved him from a Midtown office into a family home in Connecticut, and wrote his story as romantic comedy-drama, with a new baby, a winter commute and a first Christmas. The lawyer stays the same while the world around him changes, and that is where the comedy and the heartache come from.
The writers in this edition do the same thing on every page. Percival Everett took the most familiar novel in American literature and handed Huckleberry Finn's story to Jim, and James won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Rabindranath Tagore translated his own poems into English and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 with them. Philippe Vasset walked beneath France's high-voltage lines for two years and came back with the book that won this year's Prix Médicis. None of them invented a new landscape. Each of them looked at an old one from a place nobody else had stood.
Developing Empathy
Rich characters let you live inside lives you will never lead. Ana tells her first novel from several points of view, so you see what Chris Roberts's choices do to his wife Stacey, to Bridget and to Kathy, the character Ana played herself on screen. Stacey begins the first book making excuses for her marriage and ends it with her independence and her self-respect, and you travel every step of that road with her.
Jim's voice in James does the same work, and so does Combee, the history that won the 2025 Pulitzer by telling Harriet Tubman's Civil War raid through the people she freed. A news feed shows you what other people did. A story puts you inside their skin while they do it, and you close the book a little larger than you opened it.
On my own book tours, it was listening to readers, not speaking to them, that led me to self-actualisation. Empathy runs in both directions: a story teaches the reader to listen, and the reader teaches the writer to do the same.
The Slow Build
Most creative work does not arrive in a single flash of brilliance. It grows through the slow gathering and reshaping of ideas over years. Ana wrote her screenplay more than five years ago, made the film in 2021, then rewrote the same characters as novels and waited until all four books were finished before she gave any of them to readers. Her story changed shape twice before it found its final form.
M. John Harrison is 81 and could become the oldest Booker Prize winner in history. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems began life as a 75-cent pocket book, survived a customs seizure and an obscenity trial and has stayed in print for 70 years. Creativity keeps its own clock, and the people who finish are the people who keep going.
The youngest voice in this edition belongs to Arrow Travnick, a seven-year-old singer from Sydney whose first single is about growing up with artificial intelligence. She thinks AI can be really cool and helpful, but in her words, 'we still need to use our own brains, have our own ideas, be creative and be ourselves.' I could not have written a better brief for this magazine.
So this month, make something before you buy something. Write the first page, sing in the car, draw on the back of an envelope or tell your children a story with no screen in the room. You were born with a universe inside you, and every verse you write gives it a little more room.
Dr Marina Nani Editor-in-Chief
